Looking into Dragons: From Basque Violence to Drone Warfare An Interview with Cultural Anthropologist Joseba Zulaika

Society ◽  
2022 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Anthropologist ◽  
Drone Warfare

Turkey’s Burgeoning Defense Technological and Industrial Base and Expeditionary Military Policy

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (Summer 2020) ◽  
pp. 115-130
Author(s):  
Can Kasapoğlu
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Military Policy ◽  
Horn Of Africa ◽  
Hybrid Warfare ◽  
Industrial Base ◽  
Weapon Systems ◽  
Drone Warfare

As the incumbent Turkish administration strives to pursue more aspiring goals in foreign affairs, Turkey’s military policy is fast developing in line with this vision. The nation’s defense technological and industrial base can now produce various conventional weaponry. Of these, without a doubt, Turkey’s drone warfare assets have garnered the utmost attention among the international strategic community. In tandem, the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) have gradually gained an expeditionary posture with forward deployments across a broad axis, ranging from the Horn of Africa to the Gulf and the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, the military’s doctrinal order of battle has been transforming to address the unfolding hybrid warfare challenges in Ankara’s hinterland. Turkey’s proxy warfare capabilities have also registered an uptrend in this respect. Nevertheless, Ankara will have to deal with certain limitations in key segments, particularly 5th generation aircraft and strategic weapon systems which, together, represent a severe intra-war deterrence gap in Turkey’s defense posture. The Turkish administration will have to address this specific shortfall given the problematic threat landscape at the nation’s Middle Eastern doorstep. This study covers two interrelated strategic topics regarding Turkey’s national military capacity in the 21st century: its defense technological and industrial base (DTIB) and its military policy, both currently characterized by a burgeoning assertiveness.

Targeting: Precision Bombing and the Production of Ethics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maja Zehfuss
Keyword(s):  
Collateral Damage ◽  
Drone Warfare ◽  
The Ideal

The chapter examines claims that precision bombing has made warfare more ethical. It traces claims that deploying technology to increase precision, complemented by greater efforts to avoid collateral damage through targeting processes, has made warfare more acceptable in an ethical sense. It explores the meaning of ‘precision’ and questions to what extent ‘precision’ actually entails protection for non-combatants. The chapter shows how the praise for precision not only produces Western warfare as ethical but also both relies upon and reproduces a particular kind of ethics, based on the idea of non-combatant protection. Finally, it examines drone warfare, which appears to reach a new level in terms of achieving the ideal of precision. The conclusion notes the implications of this argument for how we think about war.

Just & Unjust Targeted Killing & Drone Warfare

Daedalus ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 145 (4) ◽  
pp. 12-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Walzer
Keyword(s):  
Decision Process ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Targeted Killing ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Political Costs ◽  
Drone Warfare ◽  
Opening Up

Targeted killing in the “war on terror” and in war generally is subject to familiar and severe moral constraints. The constraints hold across the board; they don't change when drones are the weapon of choice. But the ease with which drones can be used, the relative absence of military risks and political costs, makes it especially tempting not only to use drones more and more, but also to relax the constraining rules under which they are used. It seems clear that the rules have, in fact, been relaxed in the course of the American experience with drone warfare – by presidential decision and without public debate. This essay is an argument for the opening up of the decision process to democratic scrutiny and in defense of the familiar constraints.

Representing Transnational Law: Drone Warfare and Transnational Legal Text

2021 ◽  
pp. 1068-1090
Author(s):  
Jothie Rajah
Keyword(s):  
Entertainment Media ◽  
Targeted Killing ◽  
Legal Text ◽  
Transnational Law ◽  
Drone Strikes ◽  
State Actors ◽  
Drone Warfare ◽  
British State ◽  
Fictional Representations

What can entertainment media tell us about a contemporary concept of law that is being transnationalized, and why should scholars pay attention to ostensibly fictional representations of law in transnational contexts? In this chapter, I consider representations of transnational law through an analysis of Gavin Hood’s 2016 film on drone warfare, Eye in the Sky (Eye). Eye is driven by a compelling narrative tension: a child is likely to be harmed if a missile is launched at a room occupied by terrorists loading suicide vests with explosives. But if this child is not risked (sacrificed?) and the terrorists conduct their suicide mission, a minimum of eighty civilian deaths is the probable result. With lives at stake, we watch a transnational alliance of American and British state actors debate law, the rules governing drone strikes, and accountability to publics, as the decision is made to conduct the targeted killing. Dramatizing questions of law in relation to the secretive workings of drone warfare, Eye offers a valuable representation of how a very specific account of law as security is being transnationalized.

Introduction: “The True Watersheds in Human Affairs Are Seldom Spotted”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Fuller
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Dominant Set ◽  
Drone Warfare

This introductory chapter discusses how the CIA's use of armed drones has garnered increased attention from academia and investigative journalists, particularly those working in the foreign policy, defense, and legal fields. This is due in equal parts to the secrecy surrounding their use, the technological novelty of their unmanned operation, and concerns over the agency's suitability to undertake lethal operations. While disagreements over the putative military benefits, ethical downsides, and legal complexities of the CIA's campaign are common, a number of persistent themes in media and scholarly discussions have emerged over recent years, materializing into a dominant set of commonly held views about the agency's execution of drone warfare, many of which are challenged in the book.

scholarly journals In the Shadow of Akimbo Corporatism: Arched Athleticism and the Becoming-Human of ‘a People’

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-279
Author(s):  
Johnny Golding
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Drone Warfare ◽  
Body Knowledge

The importance of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari's development of ‘encounter’ is brought into sharp relief as key to the notion of ‘athleticism’. Here, each is developed as indispensable to the other, forming an a-radical/ana-material groundless ground to power, politics, literary sensibility, indeed sense itself. This nuanced encounter produces an acephaletic knowledge, a body-knowledge, without the Ego-I. In an age of massifying systems, drone warfare and horrific migrations, where corporate tentacles bend the rules akimbo, one finds that this turn to a Deleuzian athleticism offers a different kind of political analysis, a radical difference, which, despite (or because of) the odds, enables a politics of hope and indeed, of a ‘becoming-human’.

scholarly journals Gandhi’s Militant Nonviolence in the Light of Girard’s Mimetic Anthropology

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 988
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Palaver
Keyword(s):  
Fear Of Death ◽  
Mimetic Theory ◽  
Rene Girard ◽  
Cultural Anthropologist ◽  
René Girard ◽  
Contagious Nature ◽  
Nonviolent Action ◽  
God's Grace

Nuclear rivalry, as well as terrorism and the war against terror, exemplify the dangerous escalation of violence that is threatening our world. Gandhi’s militant nonviolence offers a possible alternative that avoids a complacent indifference toward injustice as well as the imitation of violence that leads to its escalation. The French-American cultural anthropologist René Girard discovered mimetic rivalries as one of the main roots of human conflicts, and also highlighted the contagious nature of violence. This article shows that Gandhi shares these basic insights of Girard’s anthropology, which increases the plausibility of his plea for nonviolence. Reading Gandhi with Girard also complements Girard’s mimetic theory by offering an active practice of nonviolence as a response to violent threats, and by broadening the scope of its religious outreach. Gandhi’s reading of the Sermon on Mount not only renounces violence and retaliation like Girard but also underlines the need to actively break with evil. Both Gandhi and Girard also address the religious preconditions of nonviolent action by underlining the need to prefer godly over worldly pursuits, and to overcome the fear of death by God’s grace. This congruence shows that Girard’s anthropology is valid beyond its usual affinity with Judaism and Christianity.

scholarly journals Communicology and Culturology: Semiotic Phenomenological Method in Applied Small Group Research

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard L. Lanigan
Keyword(s):  
Small Group ◽  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Group Formation ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Descriptive Phenomenology ◽  
University Of Toronto ◽  
Cultural Anthropologist ◽  
Dyadic Group ◽  
Semiotic Phenomenology ◽  
The University

Communicology is the science of human communication where consciousness is constituted as a medium of communication at four interconnected levels of interaction experience: intrapersonal (embodied), interpersonal (dyadic), group (social), and inter-group (cultural). The focus of the paper is the group level of communication across generations, thus constituting inter-group communication that stabilizes norms (forms a culture). I propose to explicate the way in which the method of semiotic phenomenology informs the pioneering work at the University of Toronto by Tom McFeat, a Harvard trained cultural anthropologist, on small group cultures as an experimental research methodology. Rather than the cognitiveanalytic (Husserl‘s transcendental eidetic) techniques suggest by Don Ihde as a pseudo "experimental phenomenology", McFeat provides an applied method for the empirical experimental constitution of culture in conscious experience. Group cultures are constructed in the communicological practices of group formation and transformation by means of a selfgenerating group narrative (myth) design. McFeat‘s method consists of three steps of culture formation by communication that are: (1) Content-Ordering, (2) Task-Ordering, and (3) Group-Ordering, i.e., what Ernst Cassirer and Karl Jaspers call the logic of culture or Culturology. These steps are compared to the descriptive phenomenology research procedures suggested by Amedeo Giorgi following Husserl‘s approach: (1) Find a sense of the whole, (2) Determine meaning units, (3) Transform the natural attitude expressions into phenomenologically, psychologically sensitive expressions. A second correlation will be made to Richard Lanigan‘s semiotic phenomenology method following the work of Cassirer, Jaspers, and Merleau-Ponty: (1) Description of Signs, (2) Reduction of Signifiers, and (3) Interpretation of Signifieds.

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